الفصل الفصل 30 · Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had moved out of

. Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had moved out of

college, and was contemplating the Universe, or such portions of it as

concerned him, from his comfortable lodgings in Long Wall. He was not

concerned with much. When a young man is untroubled by passions and

sincerely indifferent to public opinion, his outlook is necessarily

limited. Tibby neither wished to strengthen the position of the rich

nor to improve that of the poor, and so was well content to watch the

elms nodding behind the mildly embattled parapets of Magdalen. There

are worse lives. Though selfish, he was never cruel; though affected in

manner, he never posed. Like Margaret, he disdained the heroic

equipment, and it was only after many visits that men discovered

Schlegel to possess a character and a brain. He had done well in Mods,

much to the surprise of those who attended lectures and took proper

exercise, and was now glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he

should some day consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter. To him

thus employed Helen entered. A telegram had preceded her.

He noticed, in a distant way, that his sister had altered. As a rule he

found her too pronounced, and had never come across this look of

appeal, pathetic yet dignified—the look of a sailor who has lost

everything at sea.

“I have come from Oniton,” she began. “There has been a great deal of

trouble there.”

“Who’s for lunch?” said Tibby, picking up the claret, which was warming

in the hearth. Helen sat down submissively at the table. “Why such an

early start?” he asked.

“Sunrise or something—when I could get away.”

“So I surmise. Why?”

“I don’t know what’s to be done, Tibby. I am very much upset at a piece

of news that concerns Meg, and do not want to face her, and I am not

going back to Wickham Place. I stopped here to tell you this.”

The landlady came in with the cutlets. Tibby put a marker in the leaves

of his Chinese Grammar and helped them. Oxford—the Oxford of the

vacation—dreamed and rustled outside, and indoors the little fire was

coated with grey where the sunshine touched it. Helen continued her odd

story.

“Give Meg my love and say that I want to be alone. I mean to go to

Munich or else Bonn.”

“Such a message is easily given,” said her brother.

“As regards Wickham Place and my share of the furniture, you and she

are to do exactly as you like. My own feeling is that everything may

just as well be sold. What does one want with dusty economic books,

which have made the world no better, or with mother’s hideous

chiffoniers? I have also another commission for you. I want you to

deliver a letter.” She got up. “I haven’t written it yet. Why shouldn’t

I post it, though?” She sat down again. “My head is rather wretched. I

hope that none of your friends are likely to come in.”

Tibby locked the door. His friends often found it in this condition.

Then he asked whether anything had gone wrong at Evie’s wedding.

“Not there,” said Helen, and burst into tears.

He had known her hysterical—it was one of her aspects with which he had

no concern—and yet these tears touched him as something unusual. They

were nearer the things that did concern him, such as music. He laid

down his knife and looked at her curiously. Then, as she continued to

sob, he went on with his lunch.

The time came for the second course, and she was still crying. Apple

Charlotte was to follow, which spoils by waiting. “Do you mind Mrs.

Martlett coming in?” he asked, “or shall I take it from her at the

door?”

“Could I bathe my eyes, Tibby?”

He took her to his bedroom, and introduced the pudding in her absence.

Having helped himself, he put it down to warm in the hearth. His hand

stretched towards the Grammar, and soon he was turning over the pages,

raising his eyebrows scornfully, perhaps at human nature, perhaps at

Chinese. To him thus employed Helen returned. She had pulled herself

together, but the grave appeal had not vanished from her eyes.

“Now for the explanation,” she said. “Why didn’t I begin with it? I

have found out something about Mr. Wilcox. He has behaved very wrongly

indeed, and ruined two people’s lives. It all came on me very suddenly

last night; I am very much upset, and I do not know what to do. Mrs.

Bast—”

“Oh, those people!”

Helen seemed silenced.

“Shall I lock the door again?”

“No, thanks, Tibbikins. You’re being very good to me. I want to tell

you the story before I go abroad. You must do exactly what you

like—treat it as part of the furniture. Meg cannot have heard it yet, I

think. But I cannot face her and tell her that the man she is going to

marry has misconducted himself. I don’t even know whether she ought to

be told. Knowing as she does that I dislike him, she will suspect me,

and think that I want to ruin her match. I simply don’t know what to

make of such a thing. I trust your judgment. What would you do?”

“I gather he has had a mistress,” said Tibby.

Helen flushed with shame and anger. “And ruined two people’s lives. And

goes about saying that personal actions count for nothing, and there

always will be rich and poor. He met her when he was trying to get rich

out in Cyprus—I don’t wish to make him worse than he is, and no doubt

she was ready enough to meet him. But there it is. They met. He goes

his way and she goes hers. What do you suppose is the end of such

women?”

He conceded that it was a bad business.

“They end in two ways: Either they sink till the lunatic asylums and

the workhouses are full of them, and cause Mr. Wilcox to write letters

to the papers complaining of our national degeneracy, or else they

entrap a boy into marriage before it is too late. She—I can’t blame

her.

“But this isn’t all,” she continued after a long pause, during which

the landlady served them with coffee. “I come now to the business that

took us to Oniton. We went all three. Acting on Mr. Wilcox’s advice,

the man throws up a secure situation and takes an insecure one, from

which he is dismissed. There are certain excuses, but in the main Mr.

Wilcox is to blame, as Meg herself admitted. It is only common justice

that he should employ the man himself. But he meets the woman, and,

like the cur that he is, he refuses, and tries to get rid of them. He

makes Meg write. Two notes came from her late that evening—one for me,

one for Leonard, dismissing him with barely a reason. I couldn’t

understand. Then it comes out that Mrs. Bast had spoken to Mr. Wilcox

on the lawn while we left her to get rooms, and was still speaking

about him when Leonard came back to her. This Leonard knew all along.

He thought it natural he should be ruined twice. Natural! Could you

have contained yourself?”

“It is certainly a very bad business,” said Tibby.

His reply seemed to calm his sister. “I was afraid that I saw it out of

proportion. But you are right outside it, and you must know. In a day

or two—or perhaps a week—take whatever steps you think fit. I leave it

in your hands.”

She concluded her charge.

“The facts as they touch Meg are all before you,” she added; and Tibby

sighed and felt it rather hard that, because of his open mind, he

should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been interested

in human beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather

too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend

when books are mentioned, so Tibby’s attention wandered when “personal

relations” came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen

knew the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy,

and at Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings

has been vastly overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint

whiff of the eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it off now

if his sister had not been ceaselessly beautiful.

“You see, Helen—have a cigarette—I don’t see what I’m to do.”

“Then there’s nothing to be done. I dare say you are right. Let them

marry. There remains the question of compensation.”

“Do you want me to adjudicate that too? Had you not better consult an

expert?”

“This part is in confidence,” said Helen. “It has nothing to do with

Meg, and do not mention it to her. The compensation—I do not see who is

to pay it if I don’t, and I have already decided on the minimum sum. As

soon as possible I am placing it to your account, and when I am in

Germany you will pay it over for me. I shall never forget your

kindness, Tibbikins, if you do this.”

“What is the sum?”

“Five thousand.”

“Good God alive!” said Tibby, and went crimson.

“Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life having done one

thing—to have raised one person from the abyss: not these puny gifts of

shillings and blankets—making the grey more grey. No doubt people will

think me extraordinary.”

“I don’t care a damn what people think!” cried he, heated to unusual

manliness of diction. “But it’s half what you have.”

“Not nearly half.” She spread out her hands over her soiled skirt. “I

have far too much, and we settled at Chelsea last spring that three

hundred a year is necessary to set a man on his feet. What I give will

bring in a hundred and fifty between two. It isn’t enough.”

He could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he saw that

Helen would still have plenty to live on. But it amazed him to think

what haycocks people can make of their lives. His delicate intonations

would not work, and he could only blurt out that the five thousand

pounds would mean a great deal of bother for him personally.

“I didn’t expect you to understand me.”

“I? I understand nobody.”

“But you’ll do it?”

“Apparently.”

“I leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns Mr. Wilcox, and

you are to use your discretion. The second concerns the money, and is

to be mentioned to no one, and carried out literally. You will send a

hundred pounds on account tomorrow.”

He walked with her to the station, passing through those streets whose

serried beauty never bewildered him and never fatigued. The lovely

creature raised domes and spires into the cloudless blue, and only the

ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how evanescent was the

phantom, how faint its claim to represent England. Helen, rehearsing

her commission, noticed nothing: the Basts were in her brain, and she

retold the crisis in a meditative way, which might have made other men

curious. She was seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why

she had taken the Basts right into the heart of Evie’s wedding. She

stopped like a frightened animal and said, “Does that seem to you so

odd?” Her eyes, the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him, until

they were absorbed into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin, before whom

he paused for a moment on the walk home.

It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties. Margaret

summoned him the next day. She was terrified at Helen’s flight, and he

had to say that she had called in at Oxford. Then she said: “Did she

seem worried at any rumour about Henry?” He answered, “Yes.” “I knew it

was that!” she exclaimed. “I’ll write to her.” Tibby was relieved.

He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave him, and stated

that later on he was instructed to forward five thousand pounds. An

answer came back, very civil and quiet in tone—such an answer as Tibby

himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused,

the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen,

adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a

monumental person after all. Helen’s reply was frantic. He was to take

no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded

acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited them.

The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had

wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her money

by this time, and had even sold out her shares in the Nottingham and

Derby Railway. For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested,

and, owing to the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer

than she had been before.